Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/98

 72 special import of Britain for our studies. Whilst I cannot hope to offer you any novel or definite conclusions, I may be able to suggest fresh possibilities of research, and to urge fresh reasons why we as Englishmen, as Britons, should cherish and foster our study.

My first address endeavoured to set forth the unique importance of modern English literature for mankind, due to its being the inheritor of archaic traditions and conventions (whose disappearance would have meant the irreparable impoverishment of the sources of artistic fancy), and the medium through which so much of this archaic material, otherwise doomed to decay, has to be preserved for and interpreted to the world at large.

In tracing back the fairy realm which Shakespeare's genius has made an integral portion of literature to its source in the earliest known visions and speculations of dwellers in these islands, I confined myself to Britain. But the rôle there claimed for English letters as guardian, transmitter, and interpreter of Celtic fancy has wider implications, at which I should like to glance for one moment. We island-dwellers have brought under our sway many lands, many peoples; we claim, whether rightly or wrongly need not here be inquired, that we have given them peace and prosperity, that we are enabling the races we have subdued to enter in upon the heritage of the highest civilisation. This is much, but it is not enough. Every race, no matter how backward, has a special cry—a special vision of its own. Upon us, upon our oversea kindred, rests the responsibility that these shall not be lost, but shall contribute their note, howsoever feeble it be, to the great concert of humanity. It is the privilege of English literature to enshrine utterances of countless races of men which otherwise must wholly perish, to make them part of the world's thought and fancy.